


Coeurage

by gardnerhill



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M, Monologue, Typical Night Vale Weirdness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-22
Updated: 2013-11-22
Packaged: 2018-01-02 08:23:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1054605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The word for “heart” is at the heart of the word for “bravery” for a reason.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coeurage

When Carlos told me he planned on investigating a marauding pack of carnivorous blobs (an intermittent hazard from the Night Vale Reclamation Plant – “We Reclaim Everything”), I only nodded, made sure his flame-thrower was working and well-fuelled, and gave him a kiss before leaving for the station, feeling only the normal underlying terror that comes with daily life. It was not until I was at my seat before the microphone, cheerily telling my listeners to take the usual precautions against the blobs and letting them know that Carlos was on the case, that I wondered at my own equanimity. 

My readers who are also regular listeners may be as bewildered. You were the witnesses, after all, when I once believed Carlos dead. That belief shattered me, and I lost my composure on the air; I stammered and wept, so full of grief that I was heedless of the screeching rage of Station Management gnawing at the door trying to get at me. And this was back when he was merely my object of adoration. 

(I should perhaps remind my readers at this point that _Carlos is totally my boyfriend now_.) 

He came to us, this lover of scientific mysteries, himself the greatest mystery of them all – this beautiful stranger from outside Night Vale whose grin stole my heart at that town meeting. His nervousness and fear at everything he saw and investigated (“The radiation’s off the chart! Run for your lives!”) was as adorable as watching a kitten take its first unstable float away from its parent. He charmed everyone in town from that first day. 

Everyone loved him; but he chose me. 

When we became a couple, I was sure that the constant dangers of this town would petrify me with constant dread for him and his safety and life. There are a lot of ways to die in Night Vale, as Carlos is fond of saying – ways that would not have occurred to him before he came here. (When I hear his stories, I shake my head. I cannot picture life in a place where dragons are imaginary, where dog parks and libraries hold no threat, and where one’s poverty and skin color rather than one’s political alliances determine how the Police treat you.) I cannot be sure that the intern who brings me my midmorning coffee will be alive to bring me my midafternoon coffee. Death is like the sand in this desert – all around, inescapable. 

But it seems the opposite has occurred. Where my unreturned love for Carlos numbed my mind and halted my voice in that booth for the worst three minutes of my life that I can currently recall, my reciprocated love for Carlos has sharpened my mind and strengthened my voice – just as I know that his love for me has furthered his scientific curiosity and his fearlessness in confronting the unknown. 

Carlos - my beautiful, imperfect scientist - is a scientist; this is more important than that he is imperfect, or beautiful, or mine. His eagerness to learn something new in a dangerous place is the only reason we came into each others’ lives. If he were sober and sane and perfect, he would have stayed far away from us, creating corporate-approved toxins for Strex over in Desert Bluffs. And I would continue cheerily to intone the news and adjust my bloodstone circle without the knowledge that love could turn my guts to water and twist my heart the same way a toxic glow-cloud or slavering librarian can. 

For my part, I am a community radio host, the Voice of Night Vale. I tell the citizens of my town everything they need to know – and many things it is forbidden to know, as my regular re-education sessions repeatedly stress. I could not stop hosting the show or speaking to my listeners on the air without losing who I am, in a very essential way. 

Even when I sat with Carlos on his car in a haze of bliss, my head on his shoulder and his hand on my knee in that first hour of our joined lives, who we were as people was more important than this revelation. He told me his thoughts as he collapsed, wounded by the citizens of the underground city (“So this is how I die in Night Vale – killed by tiny people. That’s … pretty cool”). Just as his fascination with his study overrode his fear of his impending death, my need to get back into the booth as the weather ended overrode that moment of bliss. When I turned my head back to the station door, Carlos laughed in perfect understanding, and straightened out a wisp of my hair that had been cast awry by me wrenching off my headphones. “You are what you are, Cecil,” he had said. “Go. I’ll be here when you’re done.” And he was. 

And so it is now with me and my Carlos. At the announcement of the blob rampage via the SSP helicopter’s loudspeaker, his whole face lit up with the look I have only seen fixed on his blinking boxes and microscope. He is what he is – and his pleasure in investigating the tedious details of daily life in this little town is one of my greatest pleasures. I felt a great tug as well at the announcement – I needed to head to the station and tell the townspeople, to give them the tools to face the menace or how to succumb to it with the least amount of pain, and to sternly admonish John Peters that using his combine would only make the problem worse. (You know – farmers.) 

Perhaps some day Carlos will become a sober, sane and perfect scientist, and leave our town; if he goes, he will take my heart with him (I have a box all ready, just in case). Perhaps some day Carlos will be overcome by something he studies in Night Vale that will succeed where the tiny underground citizens’ first foray did not, and I will recite my loss over the air with a clear unbroken voice to the town he loved as much as I do. Perhaps one day Station Management will re-educate me so thoroughly that I will lose everything since childhood, and Carlos will be an incomprehensibly beautiful stranger to me once again. Or Station Management may finally tire of my disobedience and and order me to come see them in their office, and I will send that saved message on my phone ordering Carlos to flee to the city limits if he loves me before I perform my last act as a good citizen. 

We remain two flickering sparks temporarily together in this warm dry desert air. The difference now (the one that took me aback) is that both of us are profoundly aware of this. 

So I cheerily warn my fellow citizens, providing the information that will help keep everyone, including Carlos, as safe as possible, while Carlos does his part to keep all of us, including me, safe from that same threat with his own abilities. And for the first time in the town’s history, not one person was killed in the rampage. (Intern Kishaar did disappear in a portal that opened between walls near the station’s women’s room, but that was not connected to the blobs in any way.) What has been good for the two of us has been good for Night Vale. And as a loyal citizen, I fully support anything that makes for a happier, healthier Night Vale – even if it sharpens the fear in my gut. 

Eventually the source of that pain will drop by the station, and the pair of us will joyously reunite and celebrate our survival, and the end of Carlos’ decontamination and quarantine. Carlos will perform experiments until I cannot remember my own name, and I will speak in his ear until he is undone. After all, why should our town be the sole beneficiaries of our amazing gifts?


End file.
